Guys, nobody is going to make any money on the moon anytime soon. Or by mining asteroids, either, although that argument is more interesting, since (some) aster

Guys, nobody is going to make any money on the moon anytime soon. Or by mining asteroids, either, although that argument is more interesting, since (some) asteroids contain relatively pure rare elements. The moon, by contrast, is mostly just sand. With current technology, it costs — round ballpark figures — about $25,000 PER KILOGRAM to launch mass into geosynchronous orbit, the highest orbit for which there is any current commercial launch market. If SpaceX really gets going, which it might, that number will come down. But it won't come exponentially down. It might get cut in half. But it's still going to be really really expensive to get aything to the moon, including the infrastucture and propellant that you would need in order to get things back from the moon. Put another way, that's about $800 an ounce at current prices, and $400 an ounce in the optimistic ten year scenario. Bricks launched into space are literally as expensive as gold bars. And that's just launch cost. It isn't the cost of building the thing you're launching. Of course, the non-recurring engineering, fabrication, and test costs vary dramatically depending on the complexity of the spacecraft being built, but again, in very general terms, a geosynchronous communications satellite, which is the single spacecraft type that most closely resembles a commodity, as they are built on an assembly line, with relatively little non-recurring engineering and standardized designs and parts, those cost about $300 million each. For a grand total cost, of building and launching a plain vanilla geo commsat, of half a billion dollars. And then you have to operate the thing. Any spacecraft mission of significant complexity - the complexity associated with manned spaceflight or planetary mining - is going to require round the clock teams of hundreds of engineers. So you're talking billions more dollars per year to operate. If you're thinking of launching a man-rated lunar spacecraft, which you'd need for lunar tourism, multiply that by about thirty and you'd be at the low end of a decent estimate. A lunar prospector capable of returning samples - just samples, not bulk materials - is going to be in the low billions, plus billions more to run. A full on linar mining infrastructure is, again, tens of billions. At least. Probably hundreds of billions. There is just nothing on the moon that's worth that much. In particular, there's nothing there that wouldn't be orders of magnitude less expensive - and much less risky, which is important from an investor perspective - to simply mine or manufacture on earth. You can dig a lot of mines for ten billion dollars.